Fraudulent Facebook Likes

As a digital marketing agency, we tend to follow the latest breaking news regarding digital advertising and social media marketing platforms. Recently, USA Today asked the FBI to investigate millions of fake Facebook accounts. In summary, a crackdown by Facebook in April 2017 resulted in the removal of millions of fake users from the newspaper’s Facebook page. Despite this removal process USA Today says, remaining likes on their Facebook page still include millions of fake accounts and that the issue was not stopping. While your company might not be accumulating “Likes” at the scale of USA Today, there is still concern businesses may also be receiving fraudulent “Likes” as well. Historically, our team has recognized a few interesting occurrences around paying for “Likes”, which is why we don’t currently recommend it. For instance, we have seen multiple Facebook “Likes” campaigns result in tons of “Likes” coming from the Hispanic population with very little future involvement. When digging into the specific accounts, we’ve noticed very little news feed posting, but hundreds of business likes, which seems a bit odd. In the end, paying for “Likes” with no future interaction is pointless. Our recommendation is to build your likes organically. Enable consumers to like your Facebook page from your website, email campaigns, and finally create content or design contests in-house which engage your target customers. While we’ve noticed this problematic issue, we are still strong believers in social media advertising campaigns, where the return on investment (ROI) can be readily gauged from Google Analytics and call tracking. Has your business noticed any issues when running “Likes” campaigns on Facebook?